from the schadenfreude dept

It's always slightly amusing to watch extreme patent aggressors get hoisted by their own petard and lose a patent lawsuit. Medical device maker, Medtronic, is somewhat famous for its aggressive pursuit of patent infringement claims against others. In one case, a few years ago, a judge overturned a ruling that Medtronic had actually won and then scolded the company's lawyers, noting that their "conduct was in disregard for the duty of candor, reflecting an attitude of 'what can I get away with?'" The judge also noted that they knew "with full awareness that their case was without merit" yet they pressed ahead and "created an illusion of infringement." And this wasn't a one off. Just a few weeks later, in a totally different patent lawsuit a completely different judge scolded another set of Medtronic lawyers for doing essentially the same thing.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Technology has oftentimes advanced the weapons of war -- creating new ways to destroy things on increasingly larger scales. But as our ability to destroy has become ridiculously big, it's time to start looking for more efficient methods. Here are just a few military projects that are looking to improve targeted destruction.

from the why-did-they-bother dept

As was widely expected, Harry Reid tried to bring the problematic Cybersecurity Act back from the dead today. He needed 60 votes for cloture, which would have then allowed the bill to actually be debated upon (with various amendments considered as well). However, after a few short grandstanding speeches, the attempt at cloture failed, 51 votes to 47, well short of the 60 votes needed. Harry Reid then got up and lashed out at his colleagues, basically saying that he and other Cybersecurity supporters have been spreading so much FUD about how we're going to be attacked that he can't believe Senators didn't fall for it. Of course, one of the problems is that all of the fearmongering failed to actually identify the problems or threats other than to handwave about planes falling out of the sky and similar fanciful stories. Furthermore, it fails to acknowledge that rushing through a bill that has significant impacts on privacy of the public -- especially at a time when people are increasingly concerned about government snooping -- is a bad thing. Reid admitted that the cybersecurity bill in this Congress is likely "dead," though I'm sure something like it will be revived before too long. How about next time, rather than rushing it through and ignoring civil liberties, the government actually highlights the specific regulatory problems already in place, and why this bill is needed -- and does so while including civil liberties advocates in the discussions?

from the a-proposal dept

As a therapist would tell a couple bickering over each others' working and spending habits, Republicans and Democrats now quarreling over the federal budget should change the framing of topic. Instead of focusing only on how much the government should tax and spend in the economy we know, the leaders of the opposing parties should look at what the economy could quickly become if government passed laws encouraging productive private sector investment in growing technology-driven markets.

Forbes Magazine has just run a cover story on how the $3.9 trillion education market--$1.3 trillion in the United States alone--is about to be radically transformed by a new breed of venture-backed disruptors. Almost half of the education venture deals in the last decade have closed in the last two years. Investments in digital health care start-ups in 2012 are up 73% from last year. Health care start-ups exceeded all other sectors, including software, as the largest recipient of angel investments.

Four major national carriers, and other regional firms, have raced to build the largest deployment of high speed mobile broadband in any large country. Cable, telephone, and satellite firms are offering faster broadband, with WiFi connectivity taking on new and better dimensions in innovative network architectures. On these new platforms, e-education, e-health ventures and all manner of e-services based on government data can proliferate.

For the two political parties wedded together against their wishes by the will of the voters, common ground for agreement can be found in asking how government can help more services be created more rapidly on the knowledge platform that already hosts the most exciting business developments in the economy. Here are four examples of a multi-step program for going along and getting along.

Step one: Congress should require the Executive Branch to implement the recommendations of a group of a high-tech CEO council that identified about $1 trillion in savings achievable by 2020 through better use of technology.

Step two: Congress should overhaul corporate taxation so as to reward job creation, expand research and development, encourage long term and sustainable equity growth, provide regular returns to shareholders, sustain sensible balances of risk and reward, and applaud success in exporting goods and services for sale in other countries.

Step three: Congress should require the Executive Branch to aggregate its purchases of bandwidth so as to drive increased capital into new networks, and to move all government services into digitized forms delivered to all broadband customers.

Step four: Congress should require that all classrooms and libraries have the opportunity to win major monetary awards from government for providing breakthrough e-learning capabilities to their communities.

Inside the Beltway, years of irresolvable debate have left many Republicans and Democrats discouraged and distrustful of each other. Their battles against each other have produced a war against new ideas that they both have sadly won. If they looked outside the Beltway, they would see an America brimming as never before with hope for technological change. Our government's leaders can surprise themselves and delight the country by passing useful laws and delivering an improved standard of living for all -- and full employment. Then -- just as occurred when a trillion dollars of private investment built Internet 1.0 in the 1990s -- a rapidly growing economy would do more to balance the budget than any imaginable combination of tax increases and spending cuts.

Reed Hundt was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 1993 to 1997. Blair Levin oversaw the creation of the National Broadband Plan and is now a fellow at the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program. Their e-book, "The Politics of Abundance: How Technology Can Fix the Budget, Revive the American Dream, and Establish Obama's Legacy" details the plans in this article. See www.politicsofabundance.com for a slide presentation and to download the e-book from any major e-publishing site.

The really troubling part in all of this is the really unnecessary level of secrecy. We keep being told scary bogeyman stories about online attacks without any evidence or proof. And now the President is signing a "secret" order allowing the military to do more in response? Without any real scrutiny, it's not difficult to see how these things expand unceasingly and are wide open for abuse. Given the NSA's track record here, it's inevitable that these efforts will be massively abused.

from the taxpayer-money-at-work dept

The incompetence of Homeland Security when it comes to actually doing things is well documented -- though, they're often so clueless that they take credit for successfully misleading Congress about their own failings. So I guess it should come as little surprise that a new report shows that DHS spent about $430 million of your taxpayer dollars to get all of its radios to communicate on the same frequency and it doesn't work. At all.

Of 479 radio users the DHS inspector general tested, only one knew how to tune into the common channel, the report stated. Personnel either were unaware the channel existed, could not find it, or switched to an outdated channel inherited from the Treasury Department.

“Personnel do not have interoperable communications that they can rely on during daily operations, planned events and emergencies,” acting IG Charles K. Edwards wrote in the report.

So what was the problem? Apparently no one in top management at DHS ever thought to tell the various departments that they should be using this common channel that they were spending so much money on getting ready for this usage:

The root of the disconnect, according to the report, is top department leaders have provided little guidance and no enforcement to ensure personnel use the channel. The shift to a single frequency began when the department formed in 2003.

“Components independently developed and managed their own radio programs with no formal coordination from DHS,” and as a result, “internal interoperability was not a priority for DHS components,” Edwards reported.

The report suggested that there should be someone in charge of actually coordinating all of this (what an idea!), but DHS officials shot back that they already have a "Joint Wireless Program Management Office." Of course, this only makes the situation worse, in that they basically admit that they have an entire office set up to work on this issue... and it's now apparent that the office did little to nothing in terms of actually accomplishing what needed to be accomplished. The author of the report pointed out that it's a bit silly to point to the office that failed to do its job as proof that they're now ready to deal with this issue.

So, in a normal business, when you screw something up this badly, people get fired. Lots of them. Who's getting fired for this? Shouldn't the head of DHS have to answer to the public as to why $430 million was spent under what appears to be totally incompetent management? What are they doing over there other than seizing domains and making up terrorist plots?

from the a-string-of-failures dept

We've covered aseriesofembarrassingsetbacksfortheUS government'scaseagainstMegaupload over the past few months. It's a pretty stunning trail of errors by US officials who seemed to think that a scary story about a "bad man" would trump a lack of actual evidence or following legal procedure. While the case may hold up in the long run, it seems like everywhere you look there's evidence of highly questionable activity by the government.

The Frankfurt judges have since rejected this request, because it contains insufficient evidence. The US legal team failed to demonstrate that a web hosting service for the illegal upload of copyrighted files, amounts to a criminal offence.

According to the German 'Telemediengesetz' (communications legislation), a hosting service for foreign files will generally not be accountable unless the host had active knowledge of illegal activity. The judges also emphasised that the concept of knowledge is limited to positive knowledge. Therefore if the service provider believes that it is possible or likely that a specific piece of information is stored on their server, this is not sufficient evidence of knowledge of abuse.

According to the court ruling, there is no legal obligation to monitor the transmitted data or stored information or to search for any illegal activity.

Of course this was the same point that we raised the day that Megaupload was shut down. While it may be true that many Megaupload users have infringed on copyrights, there's a massive leap from that point to the idea that Megaupload is a criminal enterprise -- yet the US government's case basically skips over any details to make that leap. Thankfully cooler heads are recognizing that a significant amount of the US's case seems to be based on a fairy tale that US officials -- under the influence of Hollywood -- keep telling.

Tip to DOJ officials under the sway of Hollywood's version of the internet: remember, these people make their livings telling fairy tale stories. You know those opening credit lines about how something is "based on a true story"? Yeah, quite frequently the actual truth is a long way from what's shown. It seems that you may have been taken in by another such Hollywood "true" tale.

from the infuriating dept

Steven Levy has always been a great writer covering the tech industry, but his article on "the patent problem" for Wired is a must read, even if you're familiar with these stories. He does a great job illustrating just how screwed up the patent system is, focusing on a few key trolls, and pulling in some important information and data to support the anecdotal claims. Much of the story is about Mitchell Medina, who took a ridiculous patent that came from an idea about scanning medical documents into electronic format, and turned it into a belief that he held a patent on which practically every website infringed. You really should read the whole thing, but a few tidbits: first off, Medina and the two other people named on the patent never actually could build a working product.

Although the three had never tried to build a working model before they were granted the patent, they now set out to create a business based on the idea. Elias made a prototype, albeit one that Medina would later admit “didn’t work particularly well.” He claimed to have visited “every big player” they could think of in the computer industry to see if they would like to license his patent and build a commercial version themselves. He also claimed that he had attempted to raise venture capital to create a company of his own. But no corporation or VC would put money into it. According to Medina, they were particularly annoyed when, during a meeting, an executive from IBM’s Lotus division rudely dismissed the idea of paying to use the concept. “He acted as if these kinds of patents were somehow laughable,” Lech says.

Eventually Medina cut out the guy who actually came up with the idea of scanning documents, and set himself up as a patent troll. He sued over 100 companies -- and realized that as long as the "license" he asked for was cheaper than fighting him in court, everyone would pay up, and everyone did... except one company, Flagstar Bancorp. Levy goes through details of the seven years spent fighting the case, including two separate district court judges who absolutely slammed the lawsuit (one said the case had "indicia of extortion") and told Medina he had to pay up for filing such a ridiculous lawsuit (in between all that, the appeals court, ridiculously, disagreed and sent it back). Eventually the appeals court agreed with the lower court, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, but it was a massive waste of time and energy. Amazingly, the guy who demanded payment from all those companies (and got it from most), for doing absolutely nothing to actually help with the development of e-commerce, claims he's a "victim."

Mitchell Medina, who has sued more than 100 companies for infringing his patents, sees himself as a victim. “When Jobs and Wozniak or Hewlett and Packard start in a garage, they’re heroes and captains of industry,” he says. “If you apply for a patent first, you’re a troll.” Via email from Africa, he continues to attack the Flagstar decision, claiming that Martinez ignored key evidence and ruled incorrectly. (Medina felt it best not to talk by phone, because, as he put it, “I tend to speak my mind, and it would be unwise for me to do so without the self-censorship of writing.”)

“We did nothing improper,” he writes. “The judges in this case comported themselves like spectators in a Roman coliseum who wanted to see plenty of blood on the floor in the form of litigant’s money before they considered the show worthy of their interest.”

Really, this is just touching the surface. Even if you're familiar with the Flagstar case (which we wrote about last year when the final CAFC ruling came down), reading Levy's detailed piece is worth it. The problem, of course, is that this kind of thing is happening over and over and over again -- nearly all of it taking money from productive purposes of building companies and products, and sending it to lawyers. It's a massive drain on the economy and it's about time we fixed it.

from the glass-container-in-the-pool-area?-threat-level-upgraded-to-'orange' dept

As we seem to be told repeatedly, seeing something and saying something is perhaps the greatest duty an American citizen can perform in service to this country. It's simply not enough anymore to install an American flag in the front yard and purchase domestic vehicles. Now, every citizen should be keeping his eye out for (and on) his fellow citizens. The price of freedom may be eternal vigilance, but the price of security is endless paranoia.

[This seems to suggest that the Feds have already let themselves in the back door on the (sometimes prohibitively expensive) hotel wi-fi.]

- Non-VIPs who request that their presence at a hotel not be divulged.

[Let me get this straight: normal, "non-VIP" people will just have their information divulged to whoever asks, simply because they're not "important" enough to deserve privacy? Perhaps that should be posted on a sign somewhere up by the check-in desk: "All guests are created equal, but some are more equal than others."]

- Extending departure dates one day at a time for prolonged periods.

[Something only a terrorist would do. Let me give you a real life, happened-to-me example: in town to visit the famous Mayo Clinic seeking medical help for my wife. What started out as three days turned into seven days, with the stay at the hotel being extended one day at a time. Open-ended hotel stays: not just for terrorists anymore.]

- Refusal of housekeeping services for extended periods.

[This I believe. No one wants to make their own bed.]

- Extended stays with little baggage or unpacked luggage.

[Unless the staff have been instructed to do a little snooping in every room, how would anyone know how much baggage someone brought and never unpacked? No doubt this will soon make its way onto propaganda posters: "HAVE YOU PACKED ENOUGH? Traveling light is traveling with terror."]

- Access or attempted access to areas of the hotel normally restricted to staff.

- Use of cash for large transactions or a credit card in someone else’s name.

- Requests for specific rooms, floors, or other locations in the hotel.

- Abandoning a room and leaving behind clothing, toiletries, or other items.

[You'd think the Feds would be happy to have CLUES and EVIDENCE just laying around.]

- Noncompliance with other hotel policies.

[Ah. The handy catch-all. If the other points don't directly implicate you, then maybe something from this list will!]

So, to be a standup, non-terrorist citizen, here's what you need to do:

Pack for two weeks if you're staying for two days. Park your vehicle a safe distance away from the hotel, perhaps across the street or at another hotel. Leaving your vehicle dangerously unattended, walk directly through the main entrance with hands open and displayed in a non-threatening manner.

When registering, present as many forms of ID as possible. Be sure to mention where you work EVEN if no one asks. Brag if you have to. Hand out business cards to the staff. Let the desk clerk know that your stay here is no secret and that your room number should be given to anyone who asks, including those who don't ask. When asked if you have a room preference, answer with a bright, but unfrightening, "I've never had a 'preference' in my life! I'm easy to please and an American citizen!"

Head directly to your room, carefully avoiding eye contact with doors marked "Employees Only." Immediately unpack all of your luggage. Make several phones calls using ONLY the in-room phone. Call the front desk several times so as to avoid appearing suspicious. Return to your unattended vehicle and clone yourself using existing, but non-potentially-dangerous technology. Make no sudden movements and keep your ID and passport displayed prominently. Return one of yourselves to your hotel room, again using the front entrance in a non-threatening, flag-waving manner.

Stay in your room. Use the provided wi-fi. Avoid sites that use any form of encryption. Be careful not to stay in your room too long. When venturing out for something to eat or a non-suspicious conversation with the suspicious staff, avoid stairwells, hallways, exits/entrances, and connecting roads. On second thought, just stay in your room. This will make it easier to avoid being caught up in the middle of a personnel shift change.

If you must leave your room, smile and wave at each and every security camera. Lift your shirt to display lack of weapons, explosives or identifiable scars and tattoos. If purchasing anything from the hotel, use only credit cards, checks or DNA. Return to your room using the most surveilled route. Use the in-room phone to order room service. Turn down the delivery when it comes, stating that you're trying to keep visitors and deliveries to a minimum. Apologize for not having any cash to tip with, but explain that this lack of cash directly contributes (not monetarily, of course) to the safety of everyone in the hotel. Repeat this apology to housekeeping when they arrive, being sure to answer the door before they get to the second knock. Try to ignore their just-out-of-earshot griping about having to clean around the scattered contents of four large suitcases. Smile in a non-threatening fashion and shrug as if to say, "LOOK AT HOW MUCH I DON'T HAVE TO HIDE."

If you find that, despite your careful planning, your stay is going to be extended indefinitey, switch hotels. Pack all of your belongings carefully. Police the room for any stray socks, unused condoms or stealable toiletries. Turn the coffee maker OFF (if applicable). Leave in an unhurried fashion, but don't dawdle. Return to your attended vehicle and (most likely) dead clone. Drive to another hotel, preferably one a non-suspicious distance away and repeat the process. Once you return to your hometown, turn yourself into the nearest authorities for a thorough post-travel debriefing.

from the it's-a-human-right dept

Last week, Techdirt wrote about a US teenager being banned from using the Internet until his 21st birthday as punishment for his involvement with some Web site break-ins. That seems incredibly harsh, and as Mike noted, earlier bans have been tossedout on the grounds that they were unreasonable.

Banning anyone from the internet is an "unreasonable" restriction, two appeal court judges have ruled, suggesting that access to a computer at home has become a basic human right.

The decision by Mr Justice Collins and Judge Nicholas Cooke QC signals judicial recognition of how pervasive digital communications are in an era when a multitude of services can be obtained online.

What makes this judgment even more interesting is that, as with cases in the US, it concerned a sex offender. Normally, these result in especially severe sentences. So for an Internet ban to be held to be "unreasonable" even here means that for far less serious offences -- unauthorized sharing of copyright works, say -- it is hard to see Net disconnection imposed by a lower UK court being upheld upon appeal.

That would seem to spell the end of the "three strikes and you're out" approach in the UK. Of course, there are still plenty of other unjust ways of exacting collective punishment on families -- throttling their Internet connection rather than cutting it off, for example -- but it is nonetheless a hugely important decision. In particular, it seems bound to impact the UK's Digital Economy Act, whose detailed implementation is still being discussed.

from the what-a-waste-of-effort dept

Techdirt has been following the worsening censorship situation in Russia for some time. Back in July, the country's parliament passed a new law ostensibly designed to "protect the children". It took only a couple of weeks before it was used to shut down the whole of LiveJournal for part of the country. That was apparently because a neo-Nazi blog had been found among the thousands of others hosted there -- an indication of just how blunt this new instrument of censorship is.

This Monday, the Russian Government placed a Russian Wikipedia clone on a censorship blacklist. The Russian Government maintains such a kill switch for "harmful sites" – motivated with protecting children from drug use, child porn, or suicide methods. In reality, as usual, give anybody such a switch and they’ll shut off things they plain don’t like.

The Russian Wikipedia clone Lurkomore has long been a Wikipedia-on-steroids in Russia. With the notability requirement for articles relaxed, Lurkomore had become an "encyclopedia of contemporary culture, folklore, and subcultures, as well as everything else".

Presumably there is something among the thousands of articles there that someone, somewhere has taken a dislike to, causing the entire site to be blocked. However, an article on the site Lenta.ru (original in Russian) says that the people behind Lurkomore still don't know what that was, and intend to appeal against being placed on the censorship blacklist in this way. In the meantime, they have moved the site to a different IP address, at lurkmore.to, where it can presumably be accessed even by Russian children -- thus neatly demonstrating the futility of this kind of hamfisted censorship.

from the be-careful-what-you-wish-for dept

We've pointed out for years that every time the US (mainly) pushes China to be stronger on IP laws, it backfires. Chinese officials know damn well that government granted monopolies are trade barriers that can be used to bludgeon the competition -- and they almost always use IP laws against foreign companies and to protect domestic Chinese companies. So, just a day after China (once again) defended its respect for copyright, it seems worth noting that a Chinese court found Apple guilty of copyright infringement over a product called the China Encyclopedia:

The court ruled the publishing house is the only legitimate copyright owner of the Chinese History Volume of "China Encyclopedia", first edition. Its copyright is protected by Chinese laws. No organization or individual shall spread the involved content through the information network without the copyright owner's permission.

The publishing house found in October 2010 that iTunes software, which can be downloaded from a website run by Apple Electronic Products Trade (Beijing) Co Ltd, allows users to purchase and download a large part of "China Encyclopedia" from the App Store for iPhones and iPads.

Apple tried to defend itself by pointing out, quite reasonably, that it does not create all the products in the iTunes store, but the court ruled that "Apple should bear the responsibility for the App Store copyright infringement." Oh, and apparently this was just the first of a whole bunch of similar cases that have been filed against Apple. To those of you who think that China needs to show more "respect" for copyright: be careful what you wish for.

from the wake-up-people dept

Google's latest transparency report is out and the notable bit of info is that governments continue to increase how often they're seeking info about users. The increase there is a steady growth which is immensely worrisome. There's also an equally troubling increase in the attempts to censor content via Google, though in that case, it was relatively flat until the first half of this year when it shot way, way up.

Digging deeper into the data, it's not surprising to see the US top the list (by a wide margin) of governments seeking info from Google. Frankly nothing on that list is all that surprising. Looking at their annotations on takedown requests, it once again seems to show the incredibly thin-skinned nature of those in power, who then seek to abuse that power to censor information that makes them look bad. Just a couple of examples:

We received a request from the office of a local mayor to remove five blogs for criticizing the mayor. We did not remove content in response to this request.

We received a request from legal representatives of a member of the executive branch to remove 10 YouTube videos for alleged defamation. We did not remove content in response to this request.

There are a lot more like that, mostly from countries that have less respect for free speech than the US. However, some of the requests in the US are equally troubling:

We received five requests and one court order to remove seven YouTube videos for criticizing local and state government agencies, law enforcement or public officials. We did not remove content in response to these requests.

This one is concerning. What court ordered a takedown of a YouTube video criticizing local government officials? That seems like it should be public info.

Google also admits to taking down info pursuant to a court order concerning defamatory content, though at least some courts have argued that, thanks to Section 230, sites do not have to remove content, even if it's judged to be defamatory. Still, it's reasonable for Google to decide, as a matter of policy, that if a court finds content defamatory, and a proper court order is issued, that it will remove that content.

Interesting information, if still troubling, given the general trends.

from the snatching-defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory dept

Just over a year ago Techdirt wrote about Brazil's Marco Civil -- essentially a civil-rights based framework for the Internet. At the time, we dubbed it an "anti-ACTA", since it seemed to protect many of the things that ACTA sought to attack. It all seemed a little too good to be true, and the post concluded by questioning whether it would survive in its present form.

A concerning last-minute change has chipped away at the Bill's safe harbor provisions regarding copyright infringement. Article 15 of Marco Civil originally provided that ISPs are not responsible for infringing content by Third Parties unless they disobey a specific judicial order to take down said content. However, following a visit by the Minister of Culture to the legislator serving as rapporteur of Marco Civil, the rapporteur introduced a new paragraph into Article 15, saying that the article would not apply in cases of "copyright and neighborhood rights".

If passed, this exception would inevitably exert a chilling effect on all Internet activity, as Brazilian ISPs and Web sites removed content perceived to be even vaguely risky. It will come as no surprise to discover who is behind the move:

As expected, this change is an unenlightened consequence of the content industry lobby. Guilherme Varella, lawyer for the Brazilian Institute for Consumer Defense [IDEC], commented on the changes in this recent law article. He stated that this is the result of a clumsy intervention by the Ministry of Culture following constant pressure by the entertainment industry lobby, especially the Brazilian Association of Reprographic Rights (ABDR), the Brazilian Association of Phonographic Producers (ABPD) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Varella reports that the entertainment lobby has been camped outside the Ministry and the Congress for the past few weeks, pressuring the vote on the Bill to be postponed until they get what they want.

It's truly extraordinary how once again the copyright industries seem to think they are uniquely entitled to trample on basic rights. And it's particularly sad to see such a worthwhile effort to frame a basic level of protection for online users not just watered down but actively subverted in this way, precisely when it seemed on the point of coming to fruition.